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Australians need government help to spend super, argues the Grattan Institute - ABC News (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Grattan's modelling shows that Australians who draw down their super at the minimum rate when they retire will leave the equivalent of 65 per cent of their original super balance unspent by the age of 92.

Tax payer subsidy for inheritance?

that many retirees are net savers, with their super balances growing for decades after they retire, for fear of outliving their savings.

"This is not how it was meant to be.

Isn't it ? How a something works is surely representative of how it was designed.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

How a something works is surely representative of how it was designed.

While there are certainly times when this is true, I don't agree with it as a general statement. For example, archaic laws are sometimes used in ways that they were never intended for. That doesn't mean that the design objectives are necessarily 100% aligned with that modern usage, it may just mean that whoever designed it had an imperfect ability to predict the future at the time of design (which is, well, everyone).

On the video game side (which is more my wheelhouse than law), most games are designed to be fun and designed to be balanced. Well, it turns out that plenty of games turn out to not be that fun, and plenty of games turn out to be not that balanced when released. In games, patching has become common and (cynicism re: releasing incomplete games aside) allows the developers to better align reality with the intended objectives. Most software is released intending to be useful and relatively bug-free, but sometimes functionality is broken and sometimes bugs are nonetheless found.

I'm not an expert on superannuation policy, but it does seem reasonable to want to "patch" superannuation if reality doesn't align with its goals.